Who's going to buy it after launch?
Well that's it, really, isn't it? It sounds like a great investment, but have any companies actually pledged to use it? Do many companies even know about it?
It doesn't matter one iota that there's a lot of investor interest if there's next to no business interest.
It needs to attract investors more than businesses. It's offering a bank and an exchange. The exchange using collateralized postions lets people hold BitUSD, BitGold etc. on a blockchain.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BV55IrZi7g (They call it BitShares in the video but that is all part of BitShares X, the whole ecosystem which includes a lot of businesses is called BitShares now.)
Many people don't want the variance of crypto-currencies and a lot of businesses working on tight margins can't afford not to exit straight to fiat even if they offer Bitcoin purchases. 'If' the peg holds then the businesses will come.
I agree they need to do a better job marketing and also putting into a customer friendly front end that has a format traders would be familiar with.
I think the comments by 100+ post members here 'What is it?' - 'The site is quite mess' etc. those are the things they need to work on.
In their defence they're starting a whole new ecosystem of businesses so it can be hard.
My first thought was also: what is it?
That is becouse we get some difficult things trown at our heads of which we don't even know what is is, at least explain your project so everyone can understand, you know?
Yeah, I think the technology though is really game changing the main guy Daniel Larimer is a genius imo, great economic sense as well, real visionary, I back him 100%. He just can't do all the things all the time. So I think areas like marketing are letting them down a bit though they are taking steps to address them, I've seen a big improvement in the last month.
Their FAQ is pretty good
http://bitshares.org/faq/ as well as the BitShares Wiki
http://wiki.bitshares.org/index.php/Main_PageBitShares X
Bitshares X is a family of DACs that implement the business model of a bank and exchange. These distributed autonomous credit unions could rival the value of the largest banks in the world such as JP Morgan and Bank of America in just a few years. BitShares X offers a bank account that earns 5% interest where funds can be transferred in seconds anywhere in the world with more privacy and security than a Swiss bank account. Your account can never be frozen, your funds cannot be seized, and the bank can never face collapse due to loan defaults or fraud. All of this is made possible without requiring any employees, lawyers, regulatory compliance, vaults, buildings, and other infrastructure required by traditional banks. Unlike existing banks, you can hold your balance denominated in gold, silver, oil, or other commodities in additional to national currencies.
In addition to acting as a bank, BitShares X also serves as an exchange where currencies, commodities, and stock derivatives can be traded with most of the features used by professional traders including shorts and options. The bank takes a cut on every transaction and pays these transaction fees to the delegates and then shareholders by way of the Burn Rate. BitShares X can achieve this feat using the same technology that makes Bitcoin possible - irrevocable decentralized automated consensus forming. The market capitalization of shares in this new bank will exceed two times the value of all balances in gold, silver, oil, and currency accounts. This requirement allows for 200% reserve collateralizing the value of all deposits in the bank.
Right now they are working on version 1.0, it is running well on a testnet, it will be released 'shortly' with limited features
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?board=3.0 (Dry run 8: Need for speed)
In the goal of launching a minimal viable product we have stripped features that would delay release and which complicate the system. As such BitShares X has removed certain features: Ripple Consensus, Interest on BitAssets, Escrow Transaction, Etc.
BitShares in general
http://wiki.bitshares.org/index.php/What_is_BitShares%3FBitshares looks to extend the innovation of the blockchain to all industries that rely upon the internet to provide their services. Whether its banking, stock exchanges, lotteries, voting, music, auctions or many others, a digital public ledger allows for the creation of distributed autonomous companies (or DACs) that provide better quality services at a fraction of the cost incurred by their more traditional, centralized counterparts. The advent of DACs ushers in a new paradigm in organizational structure in which companies can run without any human management and under the control of an incorruptible set of business rules. These rules are encoded in publicly auditable open source software distributed across the computers of the companies’ shareholders, who effortlessly secure the company from arbitrary control.
Bitshares does for business what bitcoin did for money by utilizing distributed consensus technology to create companies that are inherently global, transparent, trustworthy, efficient and most importantly profitable.
Through BitShares PTS and BitShares AGS anyone can get a share. AGS (Angel Shares) are shares in an angel fund that supports the research, development and creation of the BitShares technology. Those who support the fund are given public credit as 10,000 AGS shares are acknowledged each day, proportional to the amount donated. Bitshares PTS is a Bitcoin fork that allows you to mine and trade your support for the BitShares ecosystem. Both BitShares AGS and BitShares PTS comes with a social consensus that at least 10% of the total shares in all future BitShares blockchains should acknowledge the support given by the holders of AGS and PTS by providing an initial balance in the genesis block of each new chain.
* AGS donations only have 9 days left of 200 day donation period.
http://www1.agsexplorer.com/There a few snapshots/IPOS that will honour PTS that will be announced as soon as the new blockchain system is running I believe
BitShares Music, BitShares.P2P & BitShares Lotto are the main ones.
This a 2.5 min of some of the guys behind/working on it.
http://vimeo.com/98988328
